Ways to use an "assistant"???

Ways to use an "assistant"???

06-05-2003, 01:57 PM

While I am making progress implementing GTD on the currently incoming items and demands, I have placed a lot of piles and miscellaneous boxes in the "Someday Maybe" category--I mean upwards of 40 boxes that are a mixture of trash, treasure, data sets that must be kept for projects, reports that need to be filed in the right places, addresses to enter, etc. Seeing as there are both college and high school students around in the summer who want part-time jobs, can anyone think of ways that a non-expert assistant could make all this go along faster?

Normally, the first two steps of any organizing effort are to purge and sort. So:

Give the assistant some clear and unambiguous definitions of trash, e.g., "any product catalog more than one year old." Have him/her go through the boxes and purge them of it.

Show the assistant the filing system that you have created to handle the current work. Have him/her go through the boxes and sort the contents into your categories, and if necessary, sort the items chronologically (or some other way) within category.

By doing the above, the assistant will have gained a lot of insight into what you do. At this point, as you process the stuff, you may be able to delegate some of the actual doing to them as well (which you will, of course, track on a delegated items list).